BURTON ALBION COMMIT TO NEW MENTAL HEALTH CHARTER

BURTON Albion Football Club and Burton Albion Community Trust are proud to announce commitment to change and have teamed up to create a Mental Health Charter.

The Sport and Recreation Alliance alongside the Professional Players Federation and with support from the mental health charity Mind, have created the Mental Health Charter for Sport and Recreation.

The Mental Health Charter for Sport and Recreation sets out how sport can use its collective power to tackle mental ill health and the stigma that surrounds it.

Alongside a number of player associations and NGBs who have already signed-up, Burton Albion Community Trust and Burton Albion Football Club have committed to take positive steps to address and encourage people to be open about mental health issues. The Charter outlines five actions that we, as a sector, can take to help make mental health a commonly understood matter and to help those in need.

As a signatory of the Mental Health Charter for Sport and Recreation we are committed to taking action across the following six areas:

Use our sport to promote good mental health and wellbeing

Adopt good mental health policies and best practices

Appoint ambassadors and role models

Tackle discrimination on the grounds of mental health

Support a pan-sport platform to develop and share resources and best practice

Throughout all of this we should regularly monitor our performance

To coincide with the new charter, former Burton Albion player and current BACT staff member, Aaron Webster, will be the ambassador for all things related to mental health that the club is associated with and delivers.

John Widdowson, Health and Inclusion Manager, said: “we’re really happy to publicise the new charter and we hope that we can help as many people as possible going forward. It’s fantastic that the club and community trust work so close together to be able to support issues such as mental health, and with the help of having Aaron Webster as ambassador, we hope that the power of our brand can tackle mental health and show people that it is ok to talk about it.”